A Green, Adolescent Sacrificehttp://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/staff-blog/graces-blog
From the climate action blog: Is a driver's license imperatively necessary as a student?

I'm turning 17 this year, but instead of learning how to drive, I'm getting rides from my mom--or, if she's not readily available, I bike or take advantage of public transportation.

It's a large sacrifice: all of my friends learned how to drive about two years ago, and are now happily driving each other around. When we were younger, driving was something associated with adults. Now, it is every teenager's first, most notable burst of independence and freedom. I see my friends on the roads everywhere.

In Bainbridge Island, Washington the student high school parking lot is full every day.

But abstaining from joining in is an individual choice, and it is important to stick with my decision. In doing so, throughout my high school career (and college as well) I won't personally be contributing any of the CO2 emissions that come from transportation. I've also gotten to know my mother a lot better.

Climate chaos, climate change, global warming—I like to call it global fever. We don’t know how hot it will get or when the fever will break, and while we wait, we suffer the fevers and chills. Summers in the arctic will soon be ice-free and weather will grow increasingly dramatic. We have some uncertainty—we will have to wait it out and adapt to changes no matter what—but the sooner we all act, the better off we will be.

The problem is clear. As Mark Lynas writes, "If we had wanted to destroy as much of life on Earth as possible, there would have been no better way of doing it than to dig up and burn as much fossil hydrocarbons as we possibly could." But I believe we can fix this. We are still alive, aren’t we? Getting depressed about the climate now, Lynas says, “is like sitting inert in your living room and watching the kitchen catch fire and then getting more and more miserable as the fire spreads throughout the house—rather than grabbing an extinguisher and dousing the flames." We wouldn’t do that, so let's not do it now.

The solutions are clear. We have been running on ancient sunlight, fossil fuels, while nature runs on current sunlight, but we will make the switch. We have many alternative energy technologies that just need funding and development. We do not have a technological problem. We have a corporate, political problem. Our government needs to free itself from corporate control and listen to what we want.

The goal of the climate bill now working its way through Congress is to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050, but many scientists now say we need to go further if we are going to avoid catastrophe. Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown and his colleagues at the Earth Policy Institute say we need to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2020, and experts and activists with Bioneers are getting behind this goal.

With this sense of urgency, several YES! interns and staff went to a
350 Day of Climate Action in Seattle. Pictures of hundreds of people forming a giant 350 were taken from the
Space Needle and from a helicopter.

We all filled out pledges to reduce our carbon footprints and received pins from the 350 campaign. Above, Madeline Ostrander, YES! Magazine senior editor, signs a creative 350 petition. Check out this slideshow and 350.org to see amazing images taken on October 24 from around the world.

As well as all the ways we can live personally sustainable and low-carbon lives, I believe we need the big changes. As we call for 80 percent reductions by 2020 and implement renewable energy sources, these are some
of the most important things we can work toward to increase our
chances for survival:

We need to abolish corporate personhood, which
gives all the rights we enjoy to giant corporations. If they have all the legal
rights humans have, as well as billions of dollars, of course they will hold the
power.

We need campaign finance reform, so we can elect
people to government who will work and get things done for the people and the
environment rather than corporate profits.

We need to give legal rights to nature, as Ecuador
has done and other South American countries are emulating. The environment
should not be considered our property.

We need to cut back our military. Costa Rica, ranked No. 1 in happiness (the U.S. is 114th), abolished their military.

We need to clean up the toxins in our
environment and consumer products as we cleanse our bodies (every human body tested
has toxins).

We need to stop shipping one country’s food to
another country to be processed and then to another country to be consumed. If
we all grow more food locally and organically, we will minimize food miles and
be healthier and happier.

We need to value our fresh water as our
life-blood. Half of the world's fresh water cycle is polluted. Our watersheds will save us, so we need to save our watersheds.

We need more people in the streets. We need to go out there
and make our government get the things we want done.

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No publisher2009-11-05T00:15:00ZBlog EntryInside the YES! Worm Binhttp://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/staff-blog/the-yes-worm-bin
From the climate action blog: The YES! office benefits from the composting action of many thousands of now-famous worms.

The YES! Magazine worm bin came out of a lunchtime discussion among staff seven years ago. Since the staff all ate lunch together every day, "we were always noticing how much food waste we had and thought, 'wouldn't it be great if we could so something with it?'" says Rod Arakaki, audience development director. Rod had a friend who donated his time to build the bin.

Employees put food scraps in a smaller bin that managing editor Doug Pibel puts in the worm bin, and staff sometimes take compost home for their gardens.

As for the worms, they are famous (if famous means mentioned on the back cover of the Fall 2009 issue of YES! Magazine). And no, interns did not have to hand-count the worms.

We keep the bin close to the back (it's just a few feet from the
kitchen). It's easy to remember to put scraps toward the worm bin.

Do you compost at work or at home? Have a similar story or idea? Let us know.

I no longer buy commercial beef, since according to Michael Pollan it takes approximately 1/3 gallon of oil per pound, between the petrochemical fertilizers for their corn feed, and the transport required in the industrial food chain (not to mention 2,500 gallons of water, 35 pounds of topsoil, and 12 pounds of grain that could be used more wisely). If I do buy beef, it is local, organic, and ideally grass-fed. It's so much better tasting and healthier, and I'm supporting the local economy as well as promoting a more sustainable farming method.

Recently my parents were trying to decide between two potential new cars: a gas-guzzling SUV and a Prius. I gave them a BIG vote for the Prius based on the simple economics of it—gas prices are only going up from here, and the resale value of the Prius is outstanding. If I had taken a high moral ground about the "right thing to do" they may not have listened. It's important to understand what your audience is receptive to and not try to guilt people into doing more sensible things for our environment. They bought the Prius, which may have had nothing to do with what I said, but hey, I feel good about it anyway.

I do everything I can to conserve resources. It's become a bit of a game for me to not buy unnecessary things, to generate teeny amounts of garbage every week (the garbage guys must laugh at my little bag), to see how low I can get my power bill (my record thus far is $15), and to drive minimally. I still drive more than I want to, but I always try to consolidate trips and not make a special trip to a store unless I have to. I tell my family and friends about this game and find that many of them are thinking this way too. It's great that it's becoming quite fashionable to be frugal with resources. But don't get me wrong, I still live very well by anyone's standards.

A few years back, there was a small blurb in YES! Magazine talking about how Australia is banning the sale of incandescent light bulbs in the next few years. I had been buying the wrong ones (that yukky blue light) and then discovered that they come in light temperatures that are nearly identical to incandescents. I have since replaced almost every bulb in my house with compact flourescents since the power consumption is so low and they last for 10 years. (No wonder we haven't banned incandescents yet—there are companies that have a vested interest in our continuing to replace them all the time!) I wonder what my power bill will be this month—currently I am running at about $20.

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No publisher2009-10-28T19:15:00ZBlog EntryKeeping Warm without Warming the Globehttp://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/staff-blog/keeping-warm-without-warming-the-globe
Media and Outreach intern Ariel Kazunas on winter-proofing for a more climate-happy home.

A bundled up Ariel

Fall always makes me think of Wisconsin. I grew up there, and some of my fondest memories of home involve the crisp, radiantly blue-skied days of early autumn, when the maples were flashy in buttery oranges and tomato reds and the birches were aglow in sweet-corn yellows. The air was refreshing after the languid, humid summer, and we went apple picking, treating ourselves to hot spiced cider afterwards.

The first frosts inevitably came, of course, and with them the need to prepare for winter. We replaced screens with storm windows to create a double-buffer against the cold outdoors, split and stacked the cord of wood which would feed the wood-burning stove that heated the majority of our first floor, and checked the seals around our doors for cracks or leaks. Wisconsin's long history of cold winters meant we had help on some fronts from those who’d come before us: our pipes were wrapped to maintain the warmth of our water as it traveled from heating tank to showerhead; our basements shielded our floors from the frozen ground; and our insulated walls and attics guarded against the bitter air.

Mom (and Mother Earth) knows best: get a sweater, Calvin!

I used to think such activities were primarily for the benefit of those of us silly enough to settle in places in which we're so ill-adapted to survive. But our winter-proofing was also a service, however modest, to the planet. Rather than crank the thermostat to “balmy,” we were attempting to eliminate our need for such extra energy in the first place.

Ironically enough, now that I live in Washington, where the skies melt away into mist and rain rather than snow and ice, I sometimes have to work a harder to keep warm and prevent wasted heat. The milder climate of the Pacific Northwest often means the houses lack things I took for granted in Wisconsin. The charm of this area’s iconic older bungalows cools a bit, for example, in the face of their dial thermostats (which can’t be programmed much beyond “on” or “off”) and their uninsulated walls, as cold to the touch as their single-paned windows.

To compensate, I’ve learned to do such things as:

Invest in (or make out of heavy plastic sheeting or even thick curtains) window insulation kits

Cover exposed pipes with discarded foam or rags.

Close off unused or poorly insulated rooms like sun porches or additions not built over foundations to eliminate the need to heat them at all.

Seal up ventilation fans in attics and check for other vents or passages between inside and out which could allow warm air to escape and cold air to enter rooms.

Pay attention to the thermostat. Get a programmable one, if possible, or manually turn the heat down—or off—when leaving the house or sleeping.

Make friends and acquire housemates! A couch full of folks under blankets is a great fossil fuel-free way to keep warm.

Discourage the tendency to combat winter’s shorter, darker days by flipping on more light switches. Come evening, gather family together in one room to do homework or relax, saving electricity through community.

If possible, get a home energy audit to discover and correct for energy waste.

These may seem like small gestures, especially since the real goal must be to make all our structures, not just our homes, energy self-sufficient rather than simply efficient—but no action is inconsequential when it comes to how we live on our planet. For now, just as fall will continue to remind me of Wisconsin, it will also remind me to dig out the extra layers, eat a few extra helpings of autumn’s bounty for warmth, and get ready for the change in the season with an eye towards the ongoing changes in the climate.

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No publisherhomepage2009-10-27T19:20:00ZBlog EntryThe YES! Gardenhttp://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/staff-blog/the-yes-garden
Here's a peek at some of the actions we are taking here at the YES! office in Bainbridge Island, Washington, from individual choices to decisions that affect the whole publication.

This summer, managing editor Doug Pibel started a garden at the YES! Magazine office. He says he's always coveted the lawn space and pursued the idea with Becca Hanson of Studio Hanson Roberts. The garden—a raised bed currently growing lettuce, China rose radishes, mizuna, arugula, spinach, rainbow chard, kale, and beets—is available to everyone in the condominium complex. Some YES! Magazine employees took extra plant starts home with them to begin or to add to their own gardens.

YES! Magazine web editor Brooke Jarvis picks some greens to make a lunchtime salad. The only problem with making a delicious salad from the YES! garden?

Co-workers may be tempted to steal!

Have a similar idea or story? Let us know.

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No publisher2009-10-23T20:52:54ZBlog EntryA More Green and Connected Life http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/staff-blog/a-more-green-and-connected-life
From the YES! climate blog: Education outreach intern Alysa Austin defies rain, wind, and snow as she bikes her way toward a more connected life.

Alysa connects with the cows from the seat of her bike

I consider myself to be a pretty green individual. I avoid plastic bags to the best of my ability, recycle what I can, and buy local produce at the farmers market. After making a big move from my home in the Northeast, and in doing so leaving my slowly deteriorating 2002 Mazda parked in my parent’s barn, I’ve been greening up my transportation style as well. I bike, walk, car pool, and occasionally—when my bed holds me hostage in the morning—run to work. And, while I am quite proud of how efficiently I am able to get to where I’m going without four wheels and a bucket of carbon emissions, I do sometimes stop and question myself…"Alysa, if you had the car, would you drive it?”

Okay, probably. But let me explain. I’m from a small town in Vermont, a place rural enough to require at least a fifteen minute drive to locate some sort of civilization outside of our country store and llama farm. If I need to get to a grocery store, my choices are fifteen minutes in the car, three hours round trip on a bike, or nine hours by foot. When there is three feet of snow on the ground, wind freezing your eyelids shut, and icy slush up to your ankles, what would you choose?

Yes, I am exaggerating a bit. But my point is that when it comes to these choices, it is very easy, I’ve found, to choose the quickest path out of discomfort. Whether it’s rain or wind or simply "I’m just too tired to make the walk up the hill", it is always easiest to say “okay, just this once.”

I am also one to enjoy a car ride. I love a good drive over curving roads, mellow music playing through the speakers, and an endless slideshow of landscape passing by my window. After giving up my car for my bike and feet; however, I’ve realized how shut off we can be from the rest of the world when we use our cars as our primary mode of transport. How odd it is to be lined up with 2 or 3 other cars at an intersections—everyone a mere 3 feet from each other, and yet not even a glance is sent over to see who is accompanying us on our commute home. Occasionally, when I’m feeling sociable, I will glance over and see who my driving companions are. Some people are talking on the phone, others smearing on lipstick, some belting out songs along with the radio. What is it about those mere inches of metal, upholstery, and paint that make us think we are actually alone?

We have all kinds of gadgets to distance us from our neighbors. With cell phones, headphones, laptops, and kindles, we have constructed imaginary walls spray painted with the words “I’m too busy” to map out the “my space” versus “your space.” It seems that we are so busy connecting with people in other places that we have lost time and patience for those right next to us.

Now that I have traded my rural country roads for the Northwest peaks and in doing so also traded my car, I’ve found unexpected pleasure where I anticipated inconvenience. What I thought might be a horrible discomfort has actually turned out to be a treasured experience. There is something infinitely more satisfying about getting myself from here to there using my own strength.

And on another level all together, an emotional and social level, I feel healthier. When I pass people on the sidewalk, I smile and say hello. I do not have the shell of my car to excuse me from acknowledging the rest of the world. I feel more at peace not only in my conscious, but in my being, knowing that by simply biking to work in the morning or walking into town, I am instantly more connected to other people.

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No publisherhomepage2009-10-16T16:35:00ZBlog EntryThe 10 Step Diethttp://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/staff-blog/the-10-step-diet
When Development Manager Jess Lind-Diamond moved from a downtown apartment to a farmhouse, she developed a new relationship to food.

Jess siphoning her homebrewed blackberry wine.

This time last year, I lived in an apartment above a movie theater and pizza shop. When I wanted food, I'd go to the grocery store, get take-out, or peruse the local farmers' market. I've been buying from local farmers for years, but I never dreamed that I'd soon be groaning about bumper zucchini crops or pressing apples along with the best of them. I didn't even have a back yard.

But two months ago, I moved into a bona fide farmhouse. There are three of us (including YES! Web editor Brooke Jarvis) and our main activity these days is bringing in—and then figuring out what to do with—baskets full of squash, pears, apples, plums, tomatoes, beans, peppers, grapes, etc. Brooke pointed out that we'd picked everything in her lunch except the walnuts. Then we discovered walnut trees down the street.

We were lucky. We inherited a fully-planted garden with an orchard to match. We didn't have to struggle through an experimental first year of soil testing and seed sampling. We got to start out with the gratification of the harvest. But even so, I'm learning a lot.

Bringing in the fall bounty from the garden and neighboring orchard.

First thing in the morning, we take piles of shriveled tomato slices out of the dehydrator, and refill with shredded zucchinini or sliced pears. Evenings and weekends, we pack jars full of pickled bean and cucumbers, and siphon the blackberry wine. It's a lot of chopping, grating, and boiling, but I feel like an alchemist. Really, Nature does most of the grunt work, but she's pretty used to it. I haven't been doing it for billions of years. You'll find me proudly describing my adventures with salsa in the office on Monday mornings to anyone who will listen.

We still get lazy and order the occasional take-out dinner when we just can't bear to eat another zucchini, or stand over a boiling pot for another minute. But the shelves in our kitchen are steadily filling up with jars of all colors, and it feels good to know we'll be stocked up for winter with food that traveled a few yards rather than a few thousand miles to our table.

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No publisher2009-10-14T16:40:00ZBlog EntryNew Paper for YES! Magazinehttp://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/staff-blog/new-paper-for-yes-magazine
For the next two weeks, we will show you some of the climate actions we are taking here at the YES! office in Bainbridge Island, Washington, from individual choices to decisions that affect the whole publication.

YES! was one of the first magazines to print on 100 percent
post-consumer recycled paper.

Starting with the fall 2009 issue, we
went a step further and switched to a lighter weight paper. Each issue
now uses 17 percent less paper, cutting down on the amount of resources it takes to get our magazine to readers.

The difference can be seen, below, when
50 issues of the Summer 2009 The New Economy issue are stacked next to 50 issues of the fall 2009 Learn as You Go issue.

Is your workplace making any decisions in an attempt to lessen environmental impact? Let us know!

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No publisher2009-10-09T21:50:00ZBlog EntryNo Impact Man and the National TV Circuithttp://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/staff-blog/no-impact-man-and-the-national-tv-circuit
A series of interviews this week, from CBS to Comedy Central, put Colin Beavan in front of millions. But can viewers laugh and learn?

“Did you do this to save the planet?" funnyman Stephen Colbert asked Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man.

But before Beavan could finish his answer, Colbert quipped: “You’re the only one doing this, right?”

And so went Beavan’s Oct. 8 appearance on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. It was his latest on the national stage discussing his recently released book, No Impact Man, and the documentary of the same name. In the interest of background, Beavan and his wife and daughter spent one year living as green as possible in New York. Many of his blog posts are reprinted at www.yesmagazine.org, and YES! Magazine will feature a new article by Beavan in its upcoming issue (available mid-November).

I read Beavan’s book and have been following the progress of the No Impact Project, so I’ve been curious about the way that the national media portray his experience and his message about the climate crisis. Print publications and Web sites have offered commentary and reviews of the book and film, but his TV appearances—on Good Morning America and CBS’ The Early Show—expose him to even wider audiences that may have never heard of him.

These TV interviews are barely five minutes long and tend to focus on the more “extreme” anecdotes of his family’s experience. The Early Show interview, for example, wrapped up with the question that most reporters have (fruitlessly) asked, based on a New York Times article about Beavan entitled, “The Year Without Toilet Paper”: What did the Beavans use instead?

Beavan shut it down. “What we want to talk about here is that we have a big emergency.”

Cue the music, cut to commercial.

Colin Beavan drives the family vehicle. In the NoImpactMan world, cars are a big no. There are others: No trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV …

No Impact Man is certainly a curiosity, and at least according to The New Yorker, that was the only point of the year-long experiment. Living by candlelight, walking up and down nine flights of stairs several times a day, giving up TV and new clothes and toys—taken together, these can be seen as radical changes, and even trying just one of the things Beavan did may be too much for some people. (Though really, should it be that hard to recycle or buy produce in season?) Trot this out before millions of viewers, and some will see Beavan as a hippie freak, others as a planet hero.

As we prepare our winter issue on climate change, we at YES! Magazine have spent considerable time talking about what it will take to propel the American public to change its behavior and help preserve the Earth for generations to come. We know that not everyone will get on board. Those who hear Colin Beavan’s message about individual action promoting broader social change and see only a fringe lifestyle or a bunch of climate-hysteria hooey won’t bother.

But many, many other people will. Beavan’s No Impact Project challenges people to gradually reduce their environmental impact over the course of one week and evaluate how the experiment changes their lives. (Beavan, incidentally, suggested Colbert sign up, to which Colbert laughed, “No way in hell…As a matter of fact, while you’re doing this, I’ll just burn a stack of tires.”)

Perhaps even a little exposure, humorous or not, raises awareness about climate change. A four-minute interview is hardly time to deliver a comprehensive message, but if people take away one idea, contemplate one change in their lives, that’s something.

Colbert, always ready with the one-liners, asked Beavan this question: “Did you manage to stay true to your intentions?”

And Beavan, in one of the few moments he was allowed to complete a thought, said, “I hoped to show that each of us could make a difference…but the real question is, we’re in a climate emergency: Is there anything that all of us can do?”

Stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Which of Colin's ideas—eating local food, not producing trash, not using fossil fuel-powered electricity or transportation, buying only used things, etc.—have you incorporated into your life?

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No publisherhomepage2009-10-09T21:20:00ZBlog EntryChoosing a Walkable Communityhttp://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/staff-blog/choosing-a-walkable-community
Media and outreach intern Ariel realizes it really is all about "location location location."

YES! Magazine media and outreach intern Ariel in a moving truck.

As a
twenty-something who’s spent the last six years bouncing between dorm rooms,
rental homes, and, now, a house that YES! Magazine provides for
interns, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the question, “Where will I live
next?” Besides adding an extra element of excitement to my life (I once fought
through a nasty bout of mononucleosis while living on a mattress in a dining room…),
answering that question has helped me think through my priorities in a way I
might not have had the chance to otherwise.

I moved
to Bainbridge Island to work for YES! Magazine from Portland, Oregon—a dreamily biker-friendly place
where I relied entirely on a solid pair of wheels or my own two feet to get
around. This wasn’t a problem, as my first four years there were spent
attending a small college with a small campus, where my commutes were usually easier to complete without a vehicle (and I
can’t deny the feeling of satisfaction I got when coasting down the bike lane
past lines of rush-hour traffic… ).

The
smaller radius I inhabited also came with an enhanced sense of community,
though I did quickly come to realize that community’s limitations. Namely, that
while my school filled in some gaps by providing eateries, ATMs, a health
center, and a mail room, the area around the campus didn’t have much more than
one specialty grocer, a gas station, and a coffee shop. Things just didn’t feel
complete.

And as I
watched school staff members, friends, and neighbors make cross-town treks to
find other businesses, farmers’ markets, service providers, and the like, I
came to understand there was a larger problem affecting not just my area, but
most cities in general: even forwards-thinking ones, like Portland, are still completely
vehicle-centric. They're decentralized in a way that often
encourages the plague of urban sprawl, but since it’s a malaise we’re all so
accustomed to, we hardly think twice about driving twenty minutes to run a
simple errand.

I
certainly didn’t—at least not until I got a taste of how easy it is to live
otherwise. Which is why, when I graduated and started the search for my next
new home, I consciously decided that I had very specific requirements for
whatever neighborhood became mine. It had to have grocers, farmers’ markets, banks,
hardware stores, parks, schools, doctors, bike routes, post-offices,
restaurants and cafes, retail stores, bus lines, community spaces… in short, it
needed all the things I would need on a daily basis, and it needed them within range of my bike.

Street scene in Florence, where many roads are closed off to car traffic, creating spaces for people to walk, bike, and meet.

Of course, price was a consideration, too, and it played a determining factor in which
house I settled on. But affordability, as a concept writ large, was already
embedded in every item on my neighborhood “must have” list; affordability was,
in fact, why I’d come up with that list in the first place. Commuting to work,
shopping for household goods, and running daily errands by bike or foot meant
eliminating the need to buy, maintain, or put gas in a car. It meant I wouldn’t
need to budget time for a rush-hour slog, and I certainly wouldn’t need to budget
money for a gym membership with all the physical activity my human-powered days
would provide.

It also
meant I wouldn’t be handed a bill further down the road in the currency of
climate disaster. If the calories in my dinner provided the fuel to get me through
the day, and the ingredients (gathered by bike or foot) in that dinner came
largely from the local farmers’ market or organically-oriented neighborhood
grocery, then I was one step closer living in a more sustainable way.

The best
part came when I finally settled on a new home and discovered a happy surprise:
many of my neighbors shared my notion of what makes a good neighborhood, and
they, too, appreciated the value of one which enforced, to a large degree, a
healthier, planet-happier lifestyle. They didn’t all arrive looking for that;
many had discovered it upon move-in and realized they couldn’t imagine giving
it up.

It was an
amazing way to see how easy fostering such a lifestyle can be, simply by
starting with simple choices and letting the ripple effect take over. It takes
active choosing, yes, and there’s
still an incredible distance to go before we’ve switched completely away
from the damaging routines to which we’ve all grown so inured. But the starting
line has been drawn, and I’m feeling strong from all my biking to start the
race!

Okay, I admit it. I use a clothes dryer. And I was feeling really guilty about that.

But I live in the Northwest where it rains a lot. The idea of rigging up a clothesline in my back yard, finding a time when it’s not raining to hang out my clothes, or setting up a rack in my living room, and having stiff sheets and towels (presuming they ever got dry)—well, all of that seemed just too hard.

But I couldn’t shake the guilt. I was running two to three dryer loads a week and I knew that does really bad things for my carbon karma.

So I read about dryers. I learned that a full dryer is far more efficient than a half-empty one. Then I noticed that my washing machine (yes, a front loader) has about half the capacity of my dryer and I suddenly realize I don’t need to dry each wash load separately. I can combine them into one dryer load.

I also noticed that the towels are the last to dry. The dryer goes probably an extra 10 minutes just to finish off those towels. What if I could get the towels almost dry before I put them in? Then I wouldn’t waste electricity and still have fluffy towels.

So I hammered two towel bars onto the wall of my utility room. I make sure my first wash load has the towels in it, and after doing that load, I hang the towels on the bars. I put the rest of the washed clothes in the dryer, but I don’t turn it on. I do a second and sometimes a third wash load. For shirts and pants, I realized I don’t need to put them in the dryer at all. I can just hang them up on clothes hangers, which makes the clothes last longer and look better.

When the towels are just barely damp and almost stiff—takes about six hours—I put them in the dryer with all the other wet things and turn it on. By now it is night—so I get extra points for doing my one dryer load when it’s not a peak time for electricity use. The whole week’s load takes about 20 minutes.

Bottom line: I’ve gone from two or three dryer loads a week to just one, and the run is shorter, since the towels now dry so quickly. I figure I’ve cut my dryer’s carbon footprint by two-thirds. And that gets rid of two-thirds of my guilt.

Yeah, I know my dryer carbon footprint is still not zero and there are heroic folks out there, even in the Northwest, who are finding ways to abandon the dryer altogether. But I can tell you that because the changes I made require so little effort on my part, I’ve stuck with them. It’s been two years since I hammered those towel bars onto the utility room wall and now this routine feels like the normal way to do laundry.

In this simple story I think there’s a secret to an important part of how we can all make the big transition to stop devastating the planet. It’s not about sacrifice. It’s about changing lots of little habits. We have so much waste in our way of living, we can wring out lots of waste. If we just give some careful thought to what steps we can take, it turns out that many of the changes are not that hard.

What habits have you been changing, and what helps you stick with them?

The drizzle was about to give way to sunrise when I dismounted and leaned my bike against a tree. Out of my bag came a pencil and a sheet of paper; off went my bike jacket, on went the fleece. I sat on a rock and waited.

A bicyclist cruised by, all waterproof gear and panniers. I marked the “eastbound” column on the sheet. One cyclist.

Here I am, I yawned, striking a blow against climate change.

Really?

After all, this was no coal-mine blockade or Survivaball stunt. This was just me on a suburban bike path, counting the cyclists and pedestrians that passed by over a two-hour period.

Well, not just me: For three mornings and evenings this past week, dozens of other bicycle enthusiasts counted two-wheeled and two-footed passers-by at appointed locations all over the state. The Bicycle and Pedestrian Documentation Project, in its second year, is a Washington State Department of Transportation effort to record the number of people getting around without their cars. The state’s Bicycle Facilities and Pedestrian Walkways Plan sets a goal of doubling bicycling and walking over the next 20 years. By showing whether and where people are using their feet, the counts are supposed to help the state determine the success of bike and pedestrian improvements and where to design others. The Cascade Bicycle Club helps the state by organizing volunteers, collecting data, and submitting a report. Last year, some 130 volunteers in 20 cities counted more than 19,000 people. Six more cities joined the count this year.

Now, global warming probably was not on the minds of all 130 volunteers, let alone those 19,000 pedestrians and cyclists. But getting out of their cars, indeed, offering to track all the people getting out of their cars, isn’t that a form of advocacy? Isn’t that at least 130 people taking a stand for bike commuting, for leaving the car at home?

I started bike commuting five months ago to be part of the YES! Bike-to-Work team, and as a way to combine my daily exercise with my rather lengthy commute. But I also like being one less car. And as I’ve grown more enamored with riding to work, I’ve been re-evaluating how I, and my family, get around.

When we at YES! talked about starting a Climate Blog, I knew I could be doing more about climate change, beyond bringing my own coffee mug everywhere: I could find ways to volunteer, to advocate for what I believe in. For someone whose stand against global warming has been limited to the ballot box and relatively convenient lifestyle changes, participating and taking action is new. Hence, the bicycle count. Up next may be Seattle’s Traffic Justice Summit.

Now we want to hear from you: How are you making changes? How are you getting involved?

For the next two months, the editors at YES! are trying to swallow the elephant that is the global climate crisis. We’re planning a winter issue on climate change, and imagining what it will take to get the world below the breaking point of a two-degree-Celsius global temperature rise. How will we get our political leaders moving? How will we create mass cultural and economic change?

When facing something so large, it’s easy to feel like the small events of our lives, the little things we do to “walk our talk,” are pretty measly. Our cartoonist’s solar shower, the organic garden we recently planted next to our office, our bike and bus rides, the apple core I just dropped in the worm compost bin behind our office door—these things all seem incommensurate with a problem so big it’s melting the glaciers off of Mount Rainier.

We all inherently feel it’s important to live in integrity with our environmental values. It’s not that we can solve the whole problem through small, personal actions. (How often have right-wingers jabbed at Al Gore’s carbon footprint, as if solving the climate crisis were as simple as weatherizing Gore’s house?)

But changing our lives helps us imagine that bigger changes are possible. As we talk about those changes, we invite others to imagine what else they can do, to go deeper, to turn our personal actions into a movement. We’re on the cusp of major climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December, and we’ll all have to do a lot more to build political will, both here and internationally, if we want climate policies to succeed in charting a safer course for humanity. But Malcolm Gladwell’s now-classic book on social innovation, The Tipping Point, tells us that social epidemics start with the actions of a few people.

So for the next couple weeks, YES! staff will be writing a series of blogs on the things each of us is doing to confront the climate crisis. We’ll talk about how we’re making our lives more sustainable, and how we’re stepping up and making our personal and political actions contagious among the people we know.

We hope the blog will inspire you to do the same—make a pact with your neighbor to give up your car, call your Senator about the climate bill (even if you’ve never dialed up the Capitol switchboard before), talk to your friends about climate change as often as you tell them about football or your kids.

Climate change isn’t going away, and the solutions will require work from all of us in ways large and small. Our blog series will explore those actions.